Go Cultivate!

Most cities lack the resources to keep up with infrastructure and service demands, yet daily decisions continue to prioritize growth and short-term wins over long-term costs and impacts.

If you’re in local government and are looking for ways to get more out of your existing resources—while building community trust and making immediate progress—we've been working on something we think will help you do just that.

We’re hosting a free, 10-part training webinar series called Emerge Stronger, where we're walking through the process we use to help city leaders align vision, policies, and investments with what citizens are willing and able to pay for. These interactive webinars are taking place every other Friday through September.

If you missed the first webinar (hosted May 22), where we talked about how you can assess the plans and other tools that your city already has at its disposal, you can still watch that one here.

The next webinar will take place on Friday, June 5, at 1:30pm Central. Register here! In this one, we'll talk about how you can assess and maximize the various resources your community has available. In particular:

• How to use land use fiscal analysis to quantify the costs and revenue productivity of your city’s land, buildings, and infrastructure—and how it can be used to align your city’s development pattern and service model with what residents are willing and able to pay for
• How to align and inspire your existing staff to maximize engagement and achievement of priority outcomes
• How to identify and tap into other partners in the community such as school districts, philanthropic groups, local businesses, and other “implementers”

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Want to take advantage of our COVID-19 discounts? Head over to verdunity.com/covid for more information on our assessments, fiscal analysis, and workshops.

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The Go Cultivate! podcast is a project of Verdunity. Find more about this and other episodes (and our blog) at verdunity.com/go-cultivate.

You can also find us on social media. Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn

And if you haven't yet, sign up for our weekly email digest. It's not lame! (Each week we collectively curate a list of the things we read that caught our attention. Then we hand-package your copy, spank a first-class stamp on that baby, and drop it right in your email inbox.) Sign up here!

Join us (and your peers!) in the Community Cultivators Network.

(Music in this episode is from Custodian of Records)

In this episode, Kevin speaks with Kennedy Smith, Senior Researcher at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance (ILSR), about strategies that city leaders can use to help local businesses weather the pandemic—and the post-pandemic world. Kennedy has just authored a report titled 'Safeguarding Small Business During the Pandemic: 26 Strategies for Local Leaders.'

The 26 actions outlined are grouped into three main priority areas that address immediate, short-term, and longer-term actions to guide community leaders:

1. First: Provide quick relief to keep businesses afloat
2. Next: Help businesses adapt and pivot
3. Later: Fix systemic problems that the pandemic has laid bare

We're big fans of ILSR, and we encourage you to check out the rest of their work as well!

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The Go Cultivate! podcast is a project of Verdunity. Find more about this and other episodes (and our blog) at verdunity.com/go-cultivate.

You can also find us on social media. Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn

And if you haven't yet, sign up for our weekly email digest. It's not lame! (Each week we collectively curate a list of the things we read that caught our attention. Then we hand-package your copy, spank a first-class stamp on that baby, and drop it right in your email inbox.) Sign up here!

Join us (and your peers!) in the Community Cultivators Network.

(This episode features music from No Money, Custodian of Records, and Petula Clark.)

verdunity.com/podcast/episode-10

R. John Anderson, co-founder of Incremental Development Alliance, joins the show to talk about the small developer movement, the CARES Act and its impact on small businesses right now, and what cities can do to cultivate a stronger small business ecosystem.

You can learn more about IncDev at incrementaldevelopment.org and on the IncDev Facebook page. John also founded and maintains the excellent Facebook group "We Do Incremental Development" (formerly "Small Developers & Builders") for anyone interested in small-scale, incremental development.

John shares some of his thoughts over at his blog, RJohnTheBad.com.

John is also Principal at Anderson|Kim Architecture + Urban Design.

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The Go Cultivate! podcast is a project of Verdunity. Find more about this and other episodes (and our blog) at verdunity.com/go-cultivate.

You can also find us on social media. Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn

And if you haven't yet, sign up for our weekly email digest. It's not lame! (Each week we collectively curate a list of the things we read that caught our attention. Then we hand-package your copy, spank a first-class stamp on that baby, and drop it right in your email inbox.) Sign up here!

Join us (and your peers!) in the Community Cultivators Network.

(The music in this episode is from No Money, Custodian of Records, & Isaac Horwedel.)

verdunity.com/podcast/episode-57

In this episode, AJ and Kevin sit down with Mike McKay, Assistant City Engineer for Lubbock, Texas, for a wide-ranging discussion on the past, present, and future of the engineering profession, and its role in the way we’ve built our cities.

Some of the ground we cover in this episode:

• The relationship between engineers and planners—how it could improve, and what each side should understand about the other
• What it means for our cities to be sustainable, and whether we’re on the right track in any meaningful ways
• Whether street standards and specification should have flexibility
• What the ideal Capital Improvement Plan looks like
• Long-term maintenance costs, and whether engineers tend to consider them when evaluating new development
• The overemphasis on auto-based mobility, and where that leaves planners and engineers who want to make life easier without a car
• How to increase support for additional infrastructure funding when cities are struggling to find the money
• Ways to modify design approaches to be more considerate of long-term maintenance costs and to minimize up-front construction costs
• How the different staff members in a city’s development process can better collaborate
• Advice for cities in the early stages of growth
• Lessons learned from Mike’s long engineering career

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The Go Cultivate! podcast is a project of Verdunity. Find more about this and other episodes (and our blog) at verdunity.com/go-cultivate.

You can also find us on social media. Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn

And if you haven't yet, sign up for our weekly email digest. It's not lame! (Each week we collectively curate a list of the things we read that caught our attention. Then we hand-package your copy, spank a first-class stamp on that baby, and drop it right in your email inbox.) Sign up here!

Join us (and your peers!) in the Community Cultivators Network.

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(Music in this episode is from No Future, Custodian of Records, & Gary Numan.)

verdunity.com/podcast/episode-44

Tiny homes have been growing in popularity over the past decade. To some, they’re an opportunity to shed unnecessary “stuff” and fully embrace a minimalist lifestyle. To others, they’re a critical part of addressing the homelessness crisis in this country. But in most cities in the U.S., it’s not exactly clear where they fit in with housing regulations.

In this installment of our “Are We Doing This Right?” series, we take a look at some of the common assumptions about tiny homes, how people are using them, what laws are applicable to them (and what’s often left unclear), which cities have embraced them, and whether other cities should follow their lead.

As always, we pull from our experience working within cities (AJ’s, anyway) and a wide body of literature on the subject to build an informed understanding of the role tiny homes can play in our communities. We look at each topic through the lens of the social and environmental impact it can have, as well as how it relates to your city’s financial and economic health.

For additional reading recommendations on this topic, head on over to the show page for this episode.

Your hosts for this episode: Jordan Clark & AJ Fawver.

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The Go Cultivate! podcast is a project of Verdunity. Find more about this and other episodes (and our blog) at verdunity.com/go-cultivate.

You can also find us on social media. Facebook / Twitter / LinkedIn

And if you haven't yet, sign up for our weekly email digest. It's not lame! (Each week we collectively curate a list of the things we read that caught our attention. Then we hand-package your copy, spank a first-class stamp on that baby, and drop it right in your email inbox.) Sign up here!

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(Music in this episode is from No Future, Custodian of Records, & David Byrne.)

verdunity.com/podcast/episode-38